Dr. Peter Rosi places blame on some parents for their babies' deaths

Acquitted in 1980 of felony negligent homicide, Peter Rosi says others are out to get him

May 22, 2009|By Patricia Callahan | Tribune reporter

Dr. Peter Rosi, the longest-serving physician in Mayer Eisenstein's practice, says he is proud that he approaches medicine "the way obstetrics was taught 50 and 100 years ago."

The fact that he has been a defendant in 10 medical malpractice cases in Cook County and was criminally prosecuted in Alaska is just proof, he said, that others are out to get him.

"The doctors in the majority try to use the legal system to disable or destroy doctors in the minority," he said.

Families allege that Rosi repeatedly made mistakes during home births and pediatric care that led to children dying or suffering brain damage, court records show.

In an interview, Rosi blamed some of the parents for their babies' deaths.

"Eighty percent of complications in childbirth are psychological," he said. "Babies can be killed by a mother's attitude."

Not long before he moved back to Illinois and joined Eisenstein in the early 1980s, medical authorities in Alaska found Rosi demonstrated "professional incompetence," records show. The Alaska State Medical Board ruled that Rosi "committed a serious error in judgment" by failing to immediately hospitalize Jacob Stednick, a newborn who had breathed in his own waste in an Alaska home birth.

Jacob died. The case sparked outrage in the small community of Sitka, and a grand jury indicted Rosi on felony negligent homicide charges. At a bench trial in 1980, a judge found Rosi not guilty but noted that Rosi "made a serious mistake."

John Stednick, in an interview three decades later, cried as he described watching his son Jacob die. "To sit there with him for 24 hours and have him hang on to my finger and look up, as if saying, 'Dad, what's happening?' "

In an interview, Rosi, 73, said he had no regrets about his treatment of Jacob.

"This was a political trial," he said, "and everybody in Alaska knew it."

In Illinois, Rosi told pregnant women whose home births ran into problems to drive long distances to hospitals where he had privileges.

Rosi, for instance, testified that he told a woman in labor to crouch on all fours in the back seat of her car while a family member drove her 75 miles an hour down the Edens Expressway from her Mundelein home to Weiss Memorial Hospital on Chicago's North Side, about an hour away. Rosi led the caravan in a separate car.

With no medical personnel monitoring her, Sara Meline passed other hospitals -- seven were closer -- that could have given her the emergency C-section she wound up having at Weiss, according to court records. Rosi testified under oath that he didn't have privileges at any of those medical centers and didn't feel that the case was an emergency.

Christopher Michael Meline was born dead in June 1996. Like Jacob Stednick, Christopher had inhaled his own waste, records show. The case was settled.

When questioned about his handling of this case, Rosi testified, "Babies die."

In an interview, Rosi stood by that statement and added that taking a home-birth patient to the nearest hospital is "fraught with danger."

"Women coming in from child home birth are often abused by doctors in the hospital," he said. "They do immediate C-sections on them."

If Rosi had taken Meline to the hospital a few miles from her home, the family contended in court filings, "Christopher would have been born alive."